Thanks for the speedy answer, I had suspected the same thing so I'm glad we've come to the same conclusion. Thanks for your help.

Good evening Mozzers. Couple of questions which I hope you can help with. Here's the first.

I am wondering, are we likely to see ranking changes if we remove the .html from the sites URLs.

For example

website.com/category/sub-category.html

Change to: website.com/category/sub-category/

We will of course make sure we 301 redirect to the new, user friendly URLs, but I am wondering if anyone has had previous experience of implementing this change and how it has effected rankings.

By having the .html in the URLs, does this stop link juice being flowed back to the root category?

Second question:

If one page can be loaded with and without a forward slash "/" at the end, is this a duplicate page, or would Google consider this as the same page? Would like to eliminate duplicate content issues if this is the case.

For example: website.com/category/ and website.com/category

Duplicate content/pages?

Hi KJ,

First things first, do you have a physical address for each location and are these set up in Google My Business? I doubt you have premises in each location, so ranking for all the areas is going to be an uphill task.

Google is smart and knows if you have physical premises in the targeted location, after all it's all about delivering highly relevant results to its users. Lets say for example you're an electrician and a user searches for "Electrician in Sheffield" - realistically, if you only have premises in Leeds, it's going to be difficult to rank above the company who is actually located in Sheffield.

I would firstly target 2-3 of your primary locations and focus on building 10x content, I would aim to write 1000+ words for each page (completely unique content) whilst focusing on your set keywords, but be natural and don't keyword stuff. Put reviews from customers in that specific area on the landing page and build citations from local directories.

Again, you can't build citations unless you have physical premises in the location. Trust me, I've done it for years for a Roofing company and it's taken some time to see the results. He's #1 for the city he is located in, but for other cities it's a very difficult task. Writing about the same service for each location is a daunting task too, you should consider Great Content to outsource the content if you're stuck for ideas. It's a low budget solution and will save you mountains of time.

I would also use folders and not subdomains. Build a 'service areas' page, examples of urls for the roofing company below.

example.com/service-areas/leeds/roofing

example.com/service-areas/sheffield/roofing

Does anyone have any experience in multilingual SEO? We are looking for software that conducts research for GEO Locations such as UAE, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan & India. Writing content for each of these countries is difficult unless we speak their language, we could look at outsourcing the translation but conducting keyword research for each location is almost impossible.

Hi Matt,

This answers my question perfectly. Everything we sell is 'designer goods' including tables, wardrobes, sideboards etc you name it.

My only concern was to have the word 'designer' too many times in the URL as it would look a little spammy, but as you described we can just keep the word 'designer' for the parent page and leave it out for the sub-categories.

We used SEM Rush and noticed a competitor doing really well in the SERPs and they have all their category path URLs removed so I was just curious if this had an impact on SEO, as the URLs looks short and user friendly.

Josh

We're looking to build some serious content and capitalise on long-tail keyword traffic for our sub-category pages, example for targeted keyword "designer dining tables".

Example of current link: www.website.com/designer-furniture/designer-dining-tables.html

Would removing the category paths help?

Example result - www.website.com/designer-dining-tables

More user friendly URLs and better for SEO would you suggest?

The only problem is, if we removed the paths would this have a hit on our traffic?

Any advice would be much appreciated. We are using Magento platform.

Thanks Chad that really helps, I came across the experiment tool previously but wasn't aware this was for A/B testing. Cheers

This might be a silly questions as I may be missing something completely obvious here, but we are completely new to A/B testing. Our site doesn't receive a phenomenal amount of traffic although we are looking to set up some A/B testing for our popular products. Is there a way to split organic traffic for a specific product page. I'm aware that we need to experiment which one performs better in Analytics but I'm unsure how to redirect 50% of the organic traffic.

Thanks Ryan. It seems the results are already starting to reappear which is quicker than I expected. Our web development company should have definitely consulted us before making this change but at least there's no major issue now. Thanks again.

Hi Ryan. Further to my original question, we've noticed some of the products we were appearing high for in the SERPS have now vanished. Although some are still showing. I assume this would be temporary whilst they are being reindexed. Should we be worried? The Web company did this without any warning.

Life saver, I have made the changes you have suggested. Thanks very much for your help.

Our web development team have changed our domain prefix from www to non www due to a server change.

Our SSL certificate would not be recognised under www and would produce a substantial error message when visiting the secure parts of our website. To prevent issues with old links they have added a permanent 301 redirect from www. to non www. urls until our sitemap catches up.

Would this impact our SEO efforts or would it have no impact as a redirect has been placed?

Thanks